Keep the Faith
by ezyl
Summary: When all else fails, keep the faith. Tezuka certainly didn't.
1. keep the faith

**Story:** Keep the Faith  
**chapter title:** keep the faith (wonderfully originally yours)  
**Rating:** PG-13. Kissing doesn't kill unless you've got Britney germs.  
**Summary:** Because if you think too much about it and you try to save it, it promptly dies. Or something similar. IMPERIAL.  
**Notes: **Revamp'd. Song by KAT-TUN.

...O_O

* * *

"Tezuka, what if ore-sama told you I loved you?"

"I'd make you go to the hospital."

"No, if I really loved you."

"But you don't," Tezuka said matter-of-factly, plucking at the fluff dangling around his shoulders. In the middle of it, their second pillow had split and the feathers had drifted around while they had clung to each other, covering the surface of everything and giving it a glazed-look of a snowy day.

It was midsummer.

Atobe peeks out the window at the gathering sunlight. "We have to go, you know. The tournaments are in a few hours and I have to shower."

And suddenly Tezuka's got him gripped at the elbow, and he feels the other man leaning forward on his side and there's a gentle kiss on his shoulder, so tender that he wonders whether or not it had actually been Tezuka kissing his shoulder.

"Hn. I have to make a trip back to Germany."

They kiss fiercely, Tezuka's got him still locked at the elbow and he's starting to feel himself grow hot and the room's beginning to look cramped and hollow in comparison to the bed, sheets mussed-up and pillows still split.

"Why don't we ever stop?" He asks a question when they sputter in the middle of a pillow feather.

"Why don't we?"

Lazy days.

--

He nudges for the shower tap, feeling the cold droplets formulate in the nozzle at first and then the steady drum of it begins to ring against the shower doors, against the glass and across the tiles and across his own chest.

He wishes that there was someone to staunch the loneliness here. The mood is so stagnant, he could almost picture the cypress trees growing around him in the swamp, ever-silent and ever-watchful, sucking up the nutrients from under the ground until he's sunk out of sight and there's nothing there but complete stillness. The man falling in the swamp, and no one there to hear his last cry.

"Why isn't he here anymore?"

--

Of course he knows why.

He's standing in front of the _why_. He should've been able to see the _who_, complain to the_ what_, see fault in the _how_, and even exact the _when_, but of course it's not there and it won't ever be there and he's feeling a little dreadful now for leaving the house first.

It's a very pretty stone. No, _pretty _won't do it justice. It's a beautiful, silvery rock. Smooth and semi-luminescent, it's planted about five inches into the earth behind a box of dirt with several words intricately carved into the background.

"_What if I told you I loved you?"_

That was what Fuji had asked him.

* * *

**A/N: **Efforts at trying to write PoT again. I fail. T.T

Thanks for reading. Please review!


	2. dythemic dystopic dyslectic

**Story:** Keep the Faith**  
by:** ezyl-who-lives-in-the-hole.  
**Chapter title:** dysthemic dystopic dyslectic (two of four).  
**Rating:** Kill the writing staff, it's PG-13.  
**Summary:** When all else fails, keep the faith.  
**Notes:** A silent protest towards lack of Yumiko-nee in fic. I've been RPS-ing too much. Oh hey, look! It's also a KAT-TUN reference. *loopy*

...

* * *

It starts with the suicide note.

He had been rummaging through Fuji's things for quite a while, now, since Yumiko had said it'd be okay, but it was the first time he'd come upon this sheet of paper. Folded once, the note was neatly lettered, carefully trimmed and the pen that slipped across the paper was a somber black ink tip. He had unfolded it without much thought, but after realizing what it had said, he was sure he would never be able to think properly, anymore.

What Fuji had written would haunt him for the rest of his life.

_I think I'm going to give up._

_I wish I could say that you never loved me, but I don't know. I wish I could say that you've always loved me, but you never say.  
_

_Goodbye, Tezuka._

Is it too late, he thinks, to tell you that I love you?

That was last year. It was also the year his doctor's report turned-up with _insomnia_, _dysthymia_, and _schizotypy_, along with a slew of prescription medications and a note suggesting indefinite hospice-boarding options. To his part, Atobe gave him an expensive oak medicine cabinet with gold-plated hinges.

"Unnecessarily-complicated polysyllabic language," he declared, after the business meeting and after Tezuka had informed him of these new developments, "They should just call you depressed and insane and let it go, Tezuka. It's bullshit."

"Since when does anyone ever use 'polysyllabic'?" He asked, amused.

"I'm is not going to let you quit my company." Atobe said flatly, "You're the only—" he opened his mouth, and then closed it.

"The only what?"

He's ignored. "Whatever. Go on a vacation or something. You don't earn four thousand yen per hour for nothing."

"I'm saving it." Tezuka told him.

"For what?" his boss laughed, "Retirement? Trust me, guys like you don't last after forty-five. I know _I_ won't."

"That's a pleasant way of putting it. I don't suppose the Canadian whisky last night had anything to do with it?"

Atobe snorts. "As if. Ore-sama's tolerance of alcohol knows no bounds."

He only smiles to himself_. He_ certainly hadn't been the one tripping up his co-worker's front steps, whining in a loud voice about not getting laid with a big-breasted girl.

--

He didn't want to burden her anymore. The woman had her own life, her own girlfriends. He had been so wrapped up in his sorrows for the first few years, and she had kept up with him, smiling and never doing anything for herself. She accompanied him on all his hospital visits, she made excuses to family and friends when he wanted to be alone, opened her legs when he wanted sex, not delivering a word of complaint when he shunned her for weeks. She was everything and anything he could've ever wanted.

But that was what had been troubling. Yumiko was simply too perfect for him. She didn't even question it when he asked for a divorce, merely nodded her head and told him that she understood. Someone like Fuji Yumiko…he would probably never come across any girl like her again.

He was a horrible person for even wanting to become close to her. Atobe agreed.

And it goes on like this, these days of being alone and tormented and confused and becoming victim to the very vestiges of this half-life, until Echizen comes back.

Because Echizen Ryoma always comes back.

* * *

**A/N**: And indeed, he does. Would you like to review? *pokes* Thanks for reading.


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